New Year, New Goals: 2022

Wow! What a year 2021 has been! I hope this message finds you well!

I wanted to wish you a happy and healthy New Year, as well as share a few updates!

I love this time of year… the holidays are an amazing opportunity to slow down and relax with family, as well as reflect on and let go of the past, dream, and plan for the future. The New Year is always a great time to start fresh!

Over the past few years, my readers, clients, colleagues, team members and family have helped me evolve in so many ways as a human being, healer, friend, leader, bosslady, wife, daughter, sister, and a mommy. ?

This year has been a bit of a roller coaster for many of us. While the current world events have been challenging to say the least, I am choosing to focus on the lessons learned and opportunities to heal.

In case you missed some of my new healing resources over the past year, I’d love to highlight a few that have made a big difference in people’s lives, to give you another opportunity to heal. ?

Articles

• The Benefits of Amino Acids for Hashimoto’s – Not only are amino acids the building blocks of numerous hormones, including thyroid hormones, but they all play important roles throughout the body (from gut repair to muscle building). That’s why getting adequate protein can be so helpful in healing Hashimoto’s! This year, I published a comprehensive article on how to get adequate protein and high quality amino acids. In it, you’ll also find tips for optimal protein digestion.
  

• Muscle Wasting – Muscle issues, such as muscle pain and muscle loss, are common symptoms in Hashimoto’s — in my clinical practice, I had observed them enough to start screening for muscle wasting in my new client intakes. I’ve learned some additional insights in my postpartum period that may be relevant for some of you and can help guide you to being muscular and toned again.

• Candida and Hashimoto’s – Did you know that gut infections such as Candida albicans can trigger or exacerbate Hashimoto’s? An overgrowth of Candida can throw off the thyroid and immune system, contributing to autoimmunity. Checking in with common Candida symptoms and considering testing options can help detect Candida sooner rather than later. If detected, treatment (which may include antifungals, dietary adjustments, and/or reducing risk factors) can help lead you towards remission from Hashimoto’s.

• How to Get Accurate Lab Tests When Taking Thyroid Medications – Routinely testing thyroid hormones is important for monitoring thyroid health and seeing if any medication and/or lifestyle adjustments need to be made to further improve one’s Hashimoto’s. However, there are numerous factors that can lead to inaccurate or false readings of thyroid hormones. This article provides a summary of these factors, as well as some tips on how to get the most accurate lab test results.

• Lithium – I first became fascinated with lithium in 2005, during my fourth year in pharmacy school, when I learned that lithium was one of only two drugs that had been shown to reduce suicidality. I had recently lost someone I loved to suicide, and while pharmaceutical lithium had a lot of supportive evidence for reducing suicidality and leveling out the extreme mood swings in bipolar disorder, lithium is a widely known thyroid-toxic drug in larger doses… But what about using nutritional lithium in small doses? My curiosity took me down a rabbit hole. I came across a Texan study which found that counties with higher levels of lithium in the water, had significantly lower levels of suicide, homicide, drug use, and violent crimes. Additionally, nutritional lithium has been shown to slow dementia, improve cognition, help heal the brain from injury and stroke, reduce inflammation, support methylation, and even promote longevity!

• Sleep Solutions for Hashimoto’s – Personally, I’ve been gifted with the ability to sleep anyplace, anywhere, for most of my life. While I had some success with helping my clients with insomnia, my success rate was nowhere near the 80 percent target that I aim for. So, sleep was a big area of study for me, both for my clients in the Adrenal Transformation Program (ATP) and in my personal life, because my sweet little son continued to wake all night until very recently. I was going through old client files with sleep issues and trying to find some patterns, searching PubMed, and updating the sleep info in ATP and my sleep article, when I came across a solution for frequent night waking that helped my 2.5 year old son sleep through the night within 24 hours, for the first time in his life (I’ll give you a clue: it involved gut health and biochemistry, and not shutting his door and leaving the room so he could figure it out on his own).

Courses

Helping others heal is truly my life’s purpose, and I am so grateful and proud of the work that my team and I are able to do to help you heal.

This summer, we re-opened my newest Adrenal Transformation Program for enrollment. This program had been a long-time in the making, and when it was first offered in 2020, I had no idea that I would release it at such a difficult time, when it was truly needed. This program focuses on sending safety signals to our bodies, utilizing a variety of healing modalities, beyond what I shared in my books. In the last few years, I’ve had an opportunity to learn new healing modalities from my own challenges and pursuits, other clinicians, training courses, emerging research and, most importantly, my clients and readers.

I am so inspired by the feedback from those who went through the program and experienced tremendous improvement in just 6 weeks, in the following symptoms:

• Brain fog – 92 percent improvement
• Fatigue – 89 percent improvement
• Forgetfulness – 89 percent improvement
• Anxiety – 86 percent improvement
• Irritability – 85 percent improvement
• …among many others!

Here’s what one participant had to say:

I was always having a lot of blood sugar balancing issues as well that were discouraging. The timing of the program was perfect to help me with the tools that I would need to further my healing journey with hashimoto’s and multiple autoimmune diseases. I worked through the program daily, watched the videos, and began to implement a lot of the protocols and ideas that Dr. Wentz discusses in the program. […] I truly loved this program, the support and community in the Facebook group, the outline of the curriculum, what was suggested/recommended to do and to try for healing were so helpful and a great tool to take with me for uses in the future. I have gone back to this information many times since completing the program and it continues to be helpful in my day to day life even now. I couldn’t recommend it more! The anxiety that I was dealing with is pretty much non-existent now, and I feel so much better when my blood sugar is kept balanced and in control. I feel better equipped to deal with this aspect if I did have issues with it in the future.

If all goes according to plan, we will be releasing the program again at the beginning of next spring. Please fill out this form if you would like to be the first to be notified of its release. ?

In the meantime, here are a few deep dive articles I released in the past year, on topics related to stress:

We also launched other programs this year:

• In May, we re-released the Thyroid Secret docuseries for a free viewing, in honor of World Thyroid Day! It was so exciting to see so many people tune in to this life-changing series and benefit from this valuable information for people who are looking to heal themselves of Hashimoto’s.

• We continued to enroll people into the Hashimoto’s Self-Management Program, and I’m so proud of the results we’ve been seeing! We will open up enrollments again in the new year. Over the last several years, this program has had phenomenal outcomes, including the following:
  • 97 percent improved their knowledge of Hashimoto’s
  • 81 percent saw an improvement/resolution in depression
  • 80 percent saw a reduction in stomach pain
  • 75 percent saw a reduction in joint pain
  • 74 percent saw an improvement in fatigue
  • 73 percent saw a reduction in TSH
  • 71 percent improved their acid reflux

• We opened our popular Root Cause Reset program up for two more sessions! It was so exciting to help thousands of people take back their health through liver support. Many of the Reset members reported that they were feeling better just one week into the dietary protocol! Members who completed the surveys at the beginning and end of the program, saw improvements in the following symptoms:
  • Weight gain – 83 percent
  • Night sweats – 78 percent
  • Depression – 78 percent
  • Fatigue – 78 percent
  • Anxiety – 77 percent
  • Mental fog – 76 percent
  • Joint pain – 76 percent
  • Chemical sensitivity – 76 percent
  • Acid reflux – 75 percent

Healing Update and a Personal Note

Last year, I shared that I had a flare up that included acid reflux, perioral dermatitis, weight gain, constipation, a rash under my nose, fatigue, skin inflammation, anxiety, sleep issues, as well as frequent and very heavy periods (about every two weeks… man, that was rough).

I was able to resolve most of the issues through functional medicine (see my Instagram post on what I did), but had to stay on progesterone to keep my period “normal.” If I missed my dose of progesterone, I would get my period almost immediately.

My intuition told me that I was too young to have progesterone issues, so I reached out to a few of my brilliant friends, including Magdalena Wszelaki and Jolene Brighten, to see how I could support my period naturally. (I also re-read the excellent books Period Repair Manual by Lara Briden and Fix Your Period by Nicole Jardin.)

Magdalena encouraged me to quit coffee, while Jolene recommended a Vitex supplement that supports progesterone naturally. I also got some delicious Beeya seed cycling powder. I only used Vitex and Beeya for a month, and since then, my periods have been coming every 28 days again. Yay!

I think coffee was my biggest trigger — I never drank coffee until my son was around 8 months old and I was exhausted from waking up every 2-3 hours all night. Thankfully, my sweet son now sleeps a sweet 10+ hours each night, which means that I no longer need the tired mommy coffee. ?

I spent a lot of time researching sleep, and I have some additional suggestions for tired parents in my Sleep Solutions for Hashimoto’s article.

One of the reasons my son sleeps so well is because we now live at sea level! While I shared about my own health challenges and Dimitry’s frequent night wakings, I didn’t share that my hubby had his own health journey when we had lived in Colorado… The more I reflect on it, the more it seems to resemble chronic mountain sickness, and his main issues were insomnia, fatigue and iron overload.

We noticed that his sleep and fatigue got much better when we came to visit our condo in a small beach city in Los Angeles, so at the end of 2020, we decided to sell our home in our beloved Boulder, CO, and test out living in sunny southern California for a bit.

We squeezed together in a one bedroom condo and didn’t have much childcare — and no, it wasn’t easy to move to a new city during the pandemic — but both Dimitry and Michael sleep so well, and feel so much better, here. When my boys sleep well and feel good, I can sleep and be more at ease as well.

Root causes are remarkable — my husband no longer had iron overload as of the last two lab tests (he used to have to donate blood every 3 months to prevent the iron from becoming toxic in his body). Iron overload is usually a lifelong condition, but it can be induced simply by living in the mountains, and can resolve after moving to sea level. We planned on living in Los Angeles for a year to see if Michael’s iron levels normalized. If they didn’t change, we planned on returning to Colorado. However, based on our experiment over the past year, it seems we will be living at sea level indefinitely. ?

That said, right after we moved, I stumbled upon some integrative approaches to iron overload. I plan on sharing more solutions for low and high iron levels in 2022. I’ve been working on an article for you for a few years, and I keep learning more.

I personally love the sunshine in Southern California, and don’t miss the snow! We get to go to the beach (my happy place) almost every day, and while we miss beautiful Boulder and the wonderful community we had there, we are happy to be feeling 100%. We are not sure if Los Angeles will be our forever home, but we are grateful for the healing we have had here and hope to visit Colorado for short trips in the future.

As my health is now stable, I don’t have too many health goals for myself, and I hope to focus more on natural beauty (remineralizing my teeth after pregnancy, nursing, and all that coffee is a high priority), as well as getting back to my work on food sensitivities. I will also be working on resetting my nervous system from the pandemic (this has already been a work-in-progress over the past 21+ months). Additionally, with my family thriving, I have more mental space to share some of the healing solutions I’ve learned.

This year, I continued in my growth as a healer, and have learned additional solutions for new conditions that I had encountered in my personal life, and/or had previously struggled with solving for some of my more challenging clients. My goal is to be able to help 80 percent of people feel at least 80 percent better. I share this information with you in my weekly newsletters because, unlike some practitioners who write their web content to make you aware of the problem so that you will schedule a time to consult with them for the solution, I don’t have much time for consulting these days. Thus, my articles are focused on giving you real solutions, without having to consult with me. I’m in the business of putting myself out of business. ?

My commitment has always been to serve the underserved, and it’s been a fulfillment of my dream to be able to share these resources with you throughout the year and hear the stories of how it has impacted your lives.

What’s on the Horizon for 2022

I’m excited for the new resources I’ve been working on for the upcoming year, and I will be sharing some more deep dive articles on many of the topics that are covered in my Hashimoto’s Self-Management Program, as well as new things I’ve learned over the past few years.

Some topics that I’ve been diving into and look forward to sharing more info on include:

• Reducing TSH naturally: I’m excited to share that I have learned about a few unique options for reducing TSH. While these options are not appropriate for everyone, I will review who may benefit from the various options out there, and how to use them for best results.
• Gut health: I’ve been studying more and more on gut health, and I will share solutions for constipation and acid reflux, along with insights and patterns from testing 300 people with Hashimoto’s, using the GI-MAP test. I am currently working on building a gut-specific program, and hope to share it with you all in the near future (read: later in 2022!).
• Relieving constipation: Being “backed up” is a common condition, particularly in those with Hashimoto’s. The good news is that there are root cause solutions to treating constipation that don’t involve harmful laxatives or prescription medications.
• Resolving acid reflux: I was reflux free for quite some time after removing dairy from my diet, but when I was pregnant, I developed acid reflux again, which can be common because of the pressure pushing on the stomach. I tried many remedies, including testing for new food sensitivities. Lo and behold, the test revealed that I was sensitive to a host of new and different foods, including chicken and salmon. Once I cut them out, my reflux was gone again. For many people, getting to the root of gut health issues, such as low stomach acid, food sensitivities, and infections, can resolve acid reflux. I’ll share a comprehensive plan with you in 2022.
• Toxins: I’ll be doing a deep dive on air quality and flame retardants, two potential thyroid toxins. I’ll cover how to identify if you are at risk of toxic exposure, and what to do about it.
• Sleep apnea: In researching sleep issues, I’ve uncovered some additional root causes and solutions for sleep apnea. I will be sharing an updated article on sleep apnea, a common Hashimoto’s trigger and exacerbating factor.
• Restoring iron and ferritin levels: Ferritin is an important nutrient for thyroid health, yet it is one of the most common nutrient deficiencies seen in people with Hashimoto’s. Hair loss and lack of energy are common symptoms of both anemia (a type of iron/ferritin deficiency) and Hashimoto’s. Iron deficiencies, infections, low stomach acid, hormone imbalances, and vitamin deficiencies — all common in Hashimoto’s — can be potential causes of anemia. I’ll be sharing a guide to restore your ferritin/iron levels using a root cause approach!

This year, I started working on my first book since becoming a mommy. Since my son now sleeps through the night, I feel like I can do more of the things I used to do. ? The book is based on my Adrenal Transformation Program, and is due to my publisher in April, and will be in stores in 2023.

Additionally, I am updating an unpublished book that I had initially started writing in 2015, that will guide you on how to improve TSH levels through medications as well as natural means. I am not sure of the publication date, but will definitely keep you posted.

And if I have time, I’ll share some info on…

• Solving thyroid-related skin issues
• Improving T4 to T3 conversion
• OCD
• Traumatic stress
• Using immunoglobulins for Hashimoto’s

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years studying additional root causes and solutions… and how to heal various conditions. I’m excited to share them with you when the time comes.

I will also be working on a Nursing Mother’s Formulary for Hashimoto’s and postpartum thyroiditis in the next year or so, to help women heal from postpartum thyroiditis and related conditions.

Besides the protocols for nursing moms, many of the root causes and solutions I’ve shared above are covered in great detail in my Hashimoto’s Self-Management Program. (I’m excited to open up enrollment for this in the New Year again, so that you can learn how to take back your health!)

I have high hopes of sharing what I learned in deeply researched and fact-checked books in the future, that ensure that no stone is left unturned, but for now, I may start with a few articles.

Anything in particular you’d like to see me cover?

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It’s been an honor to serve you, and I hope that these resources have been helpful on your journey. If you have had an “aha” moment or success story from any of them, I’d love to hear about it!

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